


At Least the War is Over

by Sour_Idealist



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: 3 Times Fic, F/F, Flashfic Sequence, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-26
Updated: 2011-06-26
Packaged: 2017-10-20 18:22:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/215759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sour_Idealist/pseuds/Sour_Idealist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes we leave people because we're afraid of what we've become; some people are hard to leave no matter what they come to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	At Least the War is Over

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this commentfest](http://moetushie.livejournal.com/464075.html?thread=3928011&style=mine#t3928011), prompt 'three times Ty Lee almost visits Azula and the one time she does.' Title from "In Our Bedroom After the War," by Stars.

The first night that Ty Lee lets herself be really alone is the last night before they leave for Kyoshi.

It's not any scarier than anything else, really. Several of the girls have asked her if she's sad about leaving what she knows behind, but it's not as if it hasn't happened before - often - and besides, what she knows is mostly gone. Somewhere mostly new will probably be better than watching the place she grew up turn into something unfamiliar. That's one of the few things that really, truly frightens her: the things she trusted to stay the same - not necessarily to be nice or safe or like anything or anyone else, but unchangeable and invulnerable - fraying and collapsing and twisting and crumpling.

At least the city isn't burning or destroyed. She's had nightmares about that once or twice, shattered glass everywhere and their own element turned against them, people screaming like animals and the world run mad.

(She hears the gossip about the last Fire Lord - the _real_ last Fire Lord, although she can almost hear Mai snorting that the history books may well give that to Ozai - and her last days, hair ragged and eyes burning, crouching like an armadillo wolf behind the fire in the throne room, shattered glass around her feet. Ty Lee closes her eyes and tries to think of something else, something that doesn't have anything to do with Azula at all. It's hard.)

\----

It isn't long before they make their way back to the South Pole, every last one of the girls armed with spectacularly filthy jokes about visiting Sokka. (Between the Fire Nation soldiers and the Dai Lee and the circus, Ty Lee knows plenty that the others don't, and if sometimes that gets her a few blank stares, other times that makes everyone happy to see her.)

The jokes taper down around the fire, though, between the grandparents and the Avatar and, for some of them, the fascination with the igloo and the snow and the clothes they're borrowing. It feels strange to Ty Lee to have so much piled all over her, but it's cold.

"We've got news from the Fire Nation," Katara says, leaning her head against the top of Aang's, and pokes him until he jerks awake and babbles it all out with her.

It's probably just Ty Lee's imagination that Katara looks directly at her when she mentions, offhand at the end, that Azula has changed. "She's quieter, but..."

 _Azula isn't quiet,_ Ty Lee thinks mulishly, blowing on her cup of soup. "But?" she asks, more shakily than she wanted - she's gotten out of practice, acting calm.

"Not in a way that's better."

Ty Lee wonders what it's like for her, how strange, alone and without anyone to control. She wonders if it's frightening. "Where are we going next?" she asks. "Ba Sing Se, right? It'll be nice to see what they're like when we're not fighting them."

\----

They make it back to the Fire Nation a few months later, all grumbling about how they seem to have become the new messenger hawks as well as everything else. (Most of them don't really mind. They've been back to Kyoshi enough not to be too homesick, and there's so _much_ of the world to see. Ty Lee promises them that they'll never get tired of it.)

It does look different already, but in a good way, things being re-colored and rebuilt as much as taken apart. It's nice not to see soldiers everywhere, or rather to see soldiers who clearly aren't any more, standing at parade-ground rest in the grocery line or folding the laundry with strict precision or keeping their smithies cleaner than makes any sense at all. A lot of them don't have jobs, she overhears Zuko confiding. (She isn't sure whether she's supposed to be with them or not, but nobody tells her to leave, so she flops out comfortably and tries out the idea of being around royalty without Azula being a part of it.) So many people train to be soldiers from the moment they start thinking about growing up, and then suddenly the war is over and some days it feels like _nobody_ knows how to do anything but fight.

Ty Lee wonders, fleetingly, if Azula might have dreamed of anything else if there hadn't been a war on, or if she was just born ready for things like that.

\----

The guard ushers Ty Lee down the hall, opens the door barely a crack, slams it the minute she's slithered inside. She barely has a moment to glance around her - pale soft edges and very little of anything - before Azula leaps at her.

It's easier than their old sparring matches, with different practice and different calm. Azula's too angry to thinks straight, but to Ty Lee everything feels clear and quick as she blocks, blocks, blocks and blocks again, not quite striking back, sizing Azula up between the blows - hair all ragged and matted, skeletal and sickly green, hissing cracked obscenities around her gasps.

Ty Lee blocks her harder than she meant, fingers going to a pressure point by instinct, and Azula stumbles back, clutching her arm.

"What do you want from me?" she hisses, spitting on the floor, and the shock hits Ty Lee like nothing else did.

"I don't -" she gasps, and then Azula's ankle wraps around her knee as the princess leaps forward, and Ty Lee's off guard enough that Azula sends her sprawling to the floor, straddling her a moment later.

She expects a proper hit, a slap to the face or Azula's splintered nails scraping her throat, but all Azula does is stare down, close enough to catch her breath - spoiled and sour.

"Who sent you?" she asks, a brittle reconstruction of her old determination. "Zuko? Mai?"

"No - me. I sent me."

 _"Why?"_

"Of - of course I would." It would be more believable if she could have come sooner, but... maybe she always meant to come. She hopes she did.

"You're frightened of me." Azula snorts. "Just like everyone. And yet none of them have the sense to let me be."

Ty Lee shakes her head minutely, just enough to indicate the gesture without moving the two of them at all. She's thought about what to say, and she takes a careful breath. "I love you more than I fear you, Azula."

Azula blinks, once, twice, shaken as well as angry now, and Ty Lee echoes it less carefully: "I love you, Azula. I told you all those times before. And I'm brave enough. If you tell me to leave, I won't listen."

Azula tries to sneer, but it collapses, and she touches two trembling fingers to Ty Lee's face.


End file.
